This is a piece that evolved from a photo of a battery operated moving doll with blinking eyes I took in a market. I found it super strange, as I was looking at it turning around on wheels, singing a song that repeats LET IT GOOOO, LET IT GOOOO, with the blinking long eyelashes and moving mechanicals eyes. It looked like a semi human with emotions, like a Kardashian with the cloned looks of females with injected faces that had undergone plastic surgeries. After painting the doll, this work was put aside for a while as I wasn’t convinced with it. It wasn’t my style or something I was comfortable with although it was well executed.
Jeffar Khaldi, Let It Go, 2020. Oil on Canvas, 220 x 180 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
I have a deep passion for sounds and music and I was struck by how beautiful the sound of “Khaliji” music is, especially music by big stars, with their big orchestra and their traditional instruments set up as well as the big chorus's introduction. Music always make me believe in humanity, it’s the sound of beauty, emotions and escape. I always feel that music make you understand and respect cultures no matter how different they are. Cultural heritages, art and music change perspectives and opinions, especially when you see the sophistication of the sound of music they produce and the passion that goes with it.
Jeffar Khaldi, Cultural Heritage, 2020. Oil on canvas, 2m x 180 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
"Long" is a piece that was challenging to create and achieve. First I removed plastered large billboard posters from locations. For some, I had to get a ladder and get my son to hold it while peeling the heavy layers of advertising that accumulated over a long period of time. New posters always get pasted on top of old ones, this create a natural art in process. Some posters would peel and expose the layer beneath them with bad weather and storms. For me this was so inviting and inspiring to salvage the posters, remove them, roll them, pack them and ship them to my studio in Dubai. There, I dissected the pieces and reassembled them by cutting some areas and working around them to create a new work out of them. This practice allowed me to save the existing, carefully planned product, advertising posters, by taking them apart and re-planning the composition by removing layers and discovering what’s hiding beneath. This practice gives you a feeling of excavating old ground and discovering the past.
Jeffar Khaldi, Long, 2020. Collage, recycled outdoor billboard advertising, found objects, painting on canvas, 525 x 220 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
During my extensive travels, I tend to capture lot of images and photos and collect them for future use in my practice. Every element and image or symbol tend to represent something or mean something. It’s all personal experiences and things I tend to relate to. Last year before Covid, I was in Utah and went to the MOAB desert for camping and mountain biking for a week. Once you’re away from the city you realise how small we are, form the beautiful landscapes and the huge rock valleys and never-ending stretch of big Rocky Mountains. Then at night when you look the sky, it’s just amazing to see the sky littered with bright stars and to think about the galaxy and the galaxy beyond this galaxy, this is just mind boggling and makes you feel so humble. On the bottom left are my buddies looking at the stars pointing and trying to figure out if one was a space station. The lady is just an exotic figure with a face of innocence and naivety just playing part of our exotic wonderful planet.
Jeffar Khaldi, Start Gazing, 2019. Oil on canvas, 230 x 260 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
Part of my practice is to always observe and put images together, this often starts in my mind with certain ideas or concepts. I came across this strange animated winged ghost figure from an animation movie and was intrigued by its presence and the way it was hovering over. A figure of a floating person in a pool always hunted me, something I saw and saved in my mind, the figure was still, quite, serene, peaceful, just floating in peace, not sure if it was staged or if it was a dead person, whatever it was I just wanted to work around it. Somehow that floating winged ghost and that floating figure worked well together. As a staunch environmentalist and lover of the wild and the woods, I created this piece adding a man to it with a mask saving an orphaned orangutan from the forest.
Jeffar Khaldi, Out of the woods, 2020. Oil on canvas, 200 x 220 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
This is semi-autobiographical piece, one of my interests in life have always been about human behavior. We are strong and weak at the same time, our strong desires can ruin the strongest man. It’s a work that combine fantasy and realism, lust and loyalty, commitment and egotism, relationship and heartaches, challenges and steadfastness. While the figure in front is more like a sculptural figure with more realistic form to get back to reality.
Jeffar Khaldi, Untitled, 2019. Oil on canvas, 230 x 260 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
Jeffar Khaldi, Open shirt, 2020. Oil on canvas, 200 x 220 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
Jeffar Khaldi, Untitled, 2020. Oil on canvas, 200 x 220 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
Jeffar Khaldi, Out of the Woods, 2020. Oil on canvas, 200 x 220 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
Jeffar Khaldi, Untitled, 2018
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
JEFFAR KHALDI | EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH
Jeffar Khaldi, Work It, 2020. Oil on canvas, 200 x 220 cm
Source: Courtesy of Michal Stancelewsky and the curator of the show, Giuseppe Moscatello.
Jeffar Khaldi’s solo exhibition Emotions Running High at the Foundry sees charged paintings evolve from political satire and pop signifiers to fantastical, dreamy scenes that marry parallel worlds and landscapes. Khaldi’s latest body of work reads like a fever dream, indicating that the lives we live aren’t separate from those we imagine. The artist guides us through some of his works in the above gallery.
The stars in Utah’s Moab Desert, Lenny Kravitz’s lush Brazilian home, African traditions and remnants of Beirut all feature in the artist’s visual narratives. In the manner of collage, Khaldi disrupts perspectival planes and repurposes previous artworks by integrating new layers. The only collage in the exhibition – the manga-like Long – is sourced from weathered billboards in Beirut’s Hamra street, which were ripped apart and restructured on the floor of his Dubai studio. Elements of older paintings were incorporated, as well as the lid of a barbecue grill. This approach of juxtaposing different times and materials as fantasies and objects draw out a complicated image. Let it Go, for instance, fragments the face of a battery-operated, blinking, guitar-playing doll Khaldi came across in Beirut’s trinket-rich Sunday Market (Souk al-Ahad) with a pie (on aluminum plate). A downcast penguin and boxer are positioned in the foreground, disconnected from the mountainous backdrop of snowy pines. In Out of the Woods, animated electric-blue ghosts multiply above a diver’s disembodied head in a tropical paradise where a man floats face down, and another has just saved an orangutan (true story).
Khaldi acts on an impulse not to leave out any negative space, assembling his threads as vignettes for dense compositions. While his memories of Beirut, where he lived with his Palestinian parents until he was 16, are still present, he connects other places and cultural forms he has encountered since he moved to Sharjah from Texas in 1995. Constantly attempting to start over and reinvent himself, his art mirrors the ruptures and changes in his life. As a teenager in war-torn Beirut, he frequented the hedonistic music scenes and adult cinemas. As a university student of interior architecture in Dallas, he became an underground graffiti artist subject to precarious conditions and finally decided to leave when his studio burned down. In the UAE, he became one of the early instigators of Al Quoz’s now-cultural warehouse district, where he established the B21 gallery space in 2005.
Khaldi believes it is the artist’s role to both envisage and document our contemporary conditions, but the references to Middle Eastern geopolitics and mediated violence have played a more indirect part over the years. His paintings are gestural and dynamic, yet figurative and saturated representations as he moves between the real and the illusory – with some social commentary. In Skid Row, a homeless man on in downtown LA leans against a frame dividing two acrobatic silhouettes while a clown watches (back to the viewer), carrying a plastic bag. Other works are more discreetly imbued with meaning: a thin tree separates the image of a runner, and a ruptured rainbow, from a bare-chested man (Open Shirt).
Intersecting histories are laid out but not all of Khaldi’s works call for an unpacking. Take his homage to the Gulf and its oral traditions with the legendary Saudi singer Mohamed Abdo (Cultural Heritage).
The exhibition is on view at Foundry until the 20th of February.